monuments, are now washed by the waters of the inundation and imbedded to a certain height in a stratum of alluvial soil which has been deposited around their base. The land about Elephantine and at Thebes has been raised about nine feet in 1,700 years. The usual rise of the river at Cairo is twenty-five feet, at Thebes thirty-eight feet, and at Aswan forty-nine feet. The average rate of the current is about three miles per hour. As the river bed rises higher and higher the amount of land covered by the waters of the inundation grows more and more. It is estimated that, if all the land thus watered were thoroughly cultivated, Egypt would, for its size, be one of the richest countries in the world.* The ancient Egyptians fully recognized how very much they owed to the Nile, and, in their hymns, they thank the Nile-god in appropriate and grateful terms. Statues of the god are painted green and red, which colours are supposed to represent 1. the colour of the river in June, when it is a bright green, before the inundation; and 2. the ruddy hue which its waters have when charged with the red mud brought down from the Abyssinian mountains. * It is greatly to be hoped that Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff will be enabled to increase the scope of the valuable work which he has done in the Irrigation Department, and to gradually carry out the works necessary to bring into cultivation those districts which are now a wilderness. EGYPTIAN WRITING. The system of writing employed by the earliest inhabitants of the Valley of the Nile known to us was entirely pictorial, and had much in common with the pictorial writing of the Chinese and the ancient people who migrated into Babylonia from the East. There appears to be no inscription in which pictorial characters are used entirely, for the earliest inscriptions now known to us contain alphabetic characters. Inscriptions upon statues, coffins, tombs, temples, etc., in which figures or representations of objects are employed, are usually termed 'Hieroglyphic' (from the Greek iepoyλupukos); for writing on papyri a cursive form of hieroglyphic called 'Hieratic' (from the Greek iepatikos), was employed by the priests, who, at times, also used hieroglyphic; a third kind of writing, consisting of purely conventional modifications of hieratic characters, which preserve little of the original form, was employed for social and business purposes; it is called demotic (from the Greek nuorikos). The following will show the different forms of the characters in the three styles of writing— I. HIERATIC. No. I is copied from the Prisse * papyrus (Maxims of Ptaḥ-hetep, p. V, 1. 1), and is transcribed and translated as follows: sexa - nef sef the heart fails, not remembers he yesterday. qes men-f en auu bu nefer xeper emThe body suffers it in [its] entirety, happiness becomes bu [bản wretchedness.t No. III is copied from the demotic version inscribed on the stele of Canopus (see p. 18), and No. IV. is the corresponding passage in the hieroglyphic version of the * This papyrus is the oldest in the world, and was written about B.C. 2500; it was presented to the Bibliothèque Nationale by Prisse, who acquired it at Thebes. † Ptaḥ-hetep is lamenting the troubles of old age, and the complete passage runs : “The understanding perisheth, an old man remembers not yesterday. The body becometh altogether pain; happiness turneth into wretchedness; and taste vanishes away." Decree. The transliteration of the Demotic, according to Hess (Roman von Stne Ha-m-us, p. 80), is:-p-hon nuter... ua n-n-uêb' ent sâtp er-p-ma uêb er-ube p-gi-n-er mnḥ n-n-nuter', "a prophet, or one of the priests who are selected for the sanctuary to perform the dressing of the gods." The transliteration of the hieroglyphic text is: hen neter erpu uă ȧmē ābu setep er ab-ur àu smā er māret neteru em sati-sen. The earliest hieroglyphic inscription is that found on the stele of Sent preserved at Oxford; it dates from the second dynasty. The oldest hieratic inscription is that contained in the famous Prisse papyrus which records the advice of Ptah-hetep to his son. It dates from the XIth or XIIth dynasty. The demotic writing appears to have come into use about B.C. 900. Hieroglyphics were used until the third century after Christ, and hieratic and demotic for at least a century later. The inscriptions on the Rosetta and Canopus stelæ are written in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek characters. The Egyptians inscribed, wrote, or painted inscriptions upon almost every kind of substance, but the material most used by them for their histories, and religious and other works was papyrus. Sections from the stem of the papyrus plant were carefully cut, and the layers were taken off, pressed flat, and several of them gummed one over the other transversely; thus almost any length of papyrus for writing upon could be made. The longest known is the great Harris papyrus, No. 1; it measures 135 feet by 18 inches. The scribe wrote upon the papyrus with reeds, and the inks were principally made of vegetable colour. Black and red are the commonest colours used, but some papyri are painted with as many as eleven or thirteen. The scribe's palette was a rectangular piece of wood varying from six to thirteen inches long by two, or two and a half, inches wide. In the middle was a hollow for holding the reeds, and at one end were the circular or oval cavities in which the colours were placed. At the beginning of the Greek rule over Egypt, the knowledge of the use of the ancient Egyptian language began to decline, and the language of Greece began to modify and eventually to supersede that of Egypt. When we consider that Ptolemy I. Soter, succeeded in attracting to Alexandria a large number of the greatest Greek scholars of the day, such as Euclid the mathematician, Stilpo of Megara, Theodorus of Cyrene and Diodorus Cronus, the philosophers, Zenodotus the grammarian, Philetas the poet, from Cos, and many others, this is not to be wondered at. The founding of the great Alexandrian Library and Museum, and the endowment of these institutions for the support of a number of the most eminent Greek philosophers and scholars, was an act of far-sighted policy on the part of Ptolemy I., whose aim was to make the learning and language of the Greeks to become dominant in Egypt. Little by little the principal posts in the Government were monopolised by the Greeks, and little by little the Egyptians became servants and slaves to their intellectually superior masters. In respect to their language, "the Egyptians were not prohibited from making use, so far as it seemed requisite according to ritual or otherwise appropriate, of the native language and of its time-hallowed written signs; in this old home, moreover, of the use of writing in ordinary intercourse the native language, alone familiar to the great public, and the usual writing must necessarily have been allowed not merely in the case of private contracts, but even as regards tax-receipts and similar documents. But this was a concession, and the ruling Hellenism strove to enlarge its domain." Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, Vol. II., p. 243. It is true that Ptolemy II. Philadelphus, employed the famous Manetho (i.e., Mer-en-Teḥuti, 'beloved , of Thoth') to draw up a history of Egypt, and an account |